So what do you think, Google fanboys? Firefox is now pretty fast, and at least as slick looking as the competitors. More room for page content vertically, especially compared to unmaximized Chrome. And it's still got a customizable toolbar and the Libary interface to the history and bookmark database. The fancier extensions are gone, like Chatzilla. All in the name of multicore rendering. Progress? Depends on what kind of user you are, I guess. I'm happy with the change so far.

I'm still angry that they broke my extensions. It was really in their worst interest to come out boasting about how noticeably faster it is because from my user experience I haven't noticed any change. Even if I wasn't already mad I would have been annoyed by that. The way I see it, they've alienated their user base. They've essentially created a Google Chrome clone.

I'm not sure who is supposed to be excited about this. Google Chrome users already had a Google Chrome. I don't anticipate too many of them switching to a nearly identical browser, just to change. People don't like change. On the other hand, many Firefox users are losing extensions that they've come to rely on. Extension developers are losing code, and for some of them they can't even reproduce the same functionality in the new Firefox without hacking on Firefox itself (i.e., patching the browser).

From what I've seen, the performance is at best about on par with Chrome. In practice, it seems Firefox is still a bigger memory hog, though they're both write-offs in this regard. I really think Mozilla has lost their way. And I don't know what their future will entail since they've pretty much lost their market share over the past 5 years, and they don't seem to have any smart strategies to gain it back.

I still consider myself a Firefox fanboy. I've preferred it since I knew what a browser was. I just can't seem to justify my preference anymore. I've already been forced to use Chrome at work, and I've gotten used to it. I still use Firefox at home, but I'm not happy with it anymore. It doesn't do the things for me that it used to do. Extensions that I used to love and rely on have been broken for years because the amount of work to fix them was too great with such little notice (and had they done the work it would all be thrown away now anyway), and it's not possible to recreate them anymore with the new engine.

Firefox 57 seems like basically a Google Chrome clone. If anything, you can say that it's a more free browser because Mozilla is a non-profit, but the Chromium browser is still free software so it's probably about as trustworthy in practice. And it doesn't seem like Mozilla cares what their users want, and it seems to have been corrupted to the core with unhealthy politics.

I'm sure it was a lot of work, but I think that the work should have been stretched out over more time to achieve feature parity with past versions and to ease extension developers into newer systems rather than making them throw away their hard work overnight. I'm not impressed. It's a yawn at best. At worst, it's upsetting.

torhu

Well, there's always forks like Waterfox and Pale Moon

MiquelFire

There was a feature that Firefox used to have built-in. All of a sudden, they directed people using that feature to an extension to keep using it because they decided not enough people used it to keep it around. Now, there's currently no way to emulate that feature...

Some features I had from another extension, I got some of it by hacking up about:config at least, but some I just lost for good now (and some, they just need to at least add a few more about:config stuff to allow me to get it back at least...)

Chris Katko

I despise Mozilla as an organization but I'll give it a shot based on your recommendation.

raynebc

I'm on the Firefox beta release channel at work, so I've been using Quantum for a while. My biggest gripes were that it took a while for AdBlockPlus to update their plugin to be compatible and NoScript isn't ready yet (possibly by the end of the week). Without ad/script blockers, the browser's CPU and memory bloat is significant throughout the day and negates any speed improvements it would have had over my old Firefox 56 install.

The only other plugins I care about are ChatZilla and Session Manager, but hopefully they're updated soon.

torhu

raynebc:I switched from ABP to uBlock Origin earlier this year, quite happy with that. And I switched to HexChat for IRC, although I don't do IRC that much anymore.

Well, I am using it now, just updated it today. So far it seems to be running fairly well. I have noticed some horrible slowdowns on some pages in the past, so hopefully this fixes things. Seems to be a tad faster, but that just may be my imagination.

They broke some extensions, but if you check the add-ons, there are "legacy" extensions you can enable again I guess, though honestly, it will do me good to disable a few of them. I got the ones I need. Many extensions were updated for this and work perfectly fine and don't seem to need a restart to enable them anymore, which is a good thing.

All in all, I am happy they are at least trying to improve it more speed wise as that has gotten pretty bad lately. I'll have to give it a week or so before I can tell if there is a noticable improvement. I certainly have noticed the lag lately, to the point of making me angry waiting for a response (but I think there is something Facebook does that causes that, I make certain I leave it off most of the time when not on it).

There's also a plain one called "Dark" by Mozilla which is nice, black background and light text on all bars. I also browsed the addon themes and found one called "Owl" which is an addon more than a theme, you click it and it turns any webpage dark with light text. Here's a screenshot of this page as I type now with it.

I also use Firefox but it's memory use is insane. Then again, the whole browser as a platform idea is insane as well. You can run a cross compiled Linux kernel in your browser... So, sometimes I use suckless surf. At least they have a better attitude on software development. https://surf.suckless.org/

Polybios

Its new design just reminds me of IE. Can't say I like it. Why do they choose to break extensions? My beloved NoScript is not working yet. Couldn't they give extension-devs more time at least?

Chris Katko

Mozilla seems to love !@$!ing on it's extension developers.

It definitely "felt" faster. But I can't tell if it's for sure or not. Notice the "omg it's 2x faster" is actually... 2x faster than the last version of Firefox... which was still insanely slower (order-of-magnitude!) than Chrome in Javascript benchmarks.

I installed Firefox 57 today and immediately got pissed off. FireGestures are gone and the alternatives do not live up to it. Also, given the fact I'm using Linux I had to map the gesture key to the middle mouse button instead of the right one as it now triggers always the contextual menu. Not to mention that it no longer works in the reader mode.

Also NoScript is gone, although it should be back again. I already switched to uBlockOrigin so that's fixed. But ScrapBook is gone as well. I haven't noticed any performance improvements, although at work on Windows I'm noticing humongous memory usage (not 57 though). One of my first thoughts today actually was: "well I might just as well start using Chrome." So, well done, Mozilla, well done.

torhu

Yeah, you definitely have to do some research before deciding to upgrade

If you are still on 56: The extensions that will stop working will have the Yellow Stamp of Death on them in the Addons Manager. Some have replacements, some not. Some might get replacements later, as Mozilla adds more APIs for WebExtensions.

Polybios

Why do they force it down people's throats when the APIs are not even there? I really cannot think of a valid reason to do so.

Yeah, you definitely have to do some research before deciding to upgrade

Well, I knew it's going to happen. Only when I did check the 57 today morning during the package update I was like: "hm, wasn't the 57 the one that will kill all the legacy extensions?" And I have to say that performance wise the 57 seems to me a little bit worse. Some pages take simply to load than previously.

SiegeLord

Yeah, I've had 56 pinned on my Linux (and disabled upgrades on Windows) since I just don't feel like losing my extensions (Tab Mix Plus is the main one). I did let it update on my fiance's computer, and since she has been complaining about speed issues on certain websites (I haven't ruled out pesky bitcoin miners yet) it'll be interesting to see if it helps, so I'll give it a try vicariously...

torhu

<hyperbole>While this marks the end of an era for web browsers, it could also mean both significant improvements to Firefox, and a larger part to play for Firefox forks.</hyperbole>

Neil Roy

It seems to be running fast enough and smooth enough for me. I lost a few extensions, but nothing important. I already found a replacement for one that I used a lot today. But this is all par for the course. Whenever someone makes major changes that generally lead to improvements on this scale, you're bound to have some bumps in the road and a short period of adjustment time. Most of the add-ons will get updated no doubt and things will be back to normal.

I tried other browsers and didn't see the speed improvements in them at all, but I did see the same memory hogging, so I don't blame Firefox for that. I think it's just the nature of the web, with all the larger images and media these days coupled with multiple tabs has to lead to greater memory usage. Facebook seems to be the absolute worst for memory hogging and I am certain they have a memory leak in whatever they have running in the background as you can do nothing on Facebook, and just sit and watch the memory usage continually rise.

In any event, I'll stick to Firefox, it does what I want, fast enough on my 7 year old computer. I don't think Firefox is slow, I think people are way too impatient.

torhu

There has been a problem with YouTube and Firefox for the last few days. The workaround is to click on your profile icon, the last link there is for going back to the old YouTube layout. YouTube is much nicer that way, too.

bamccaig

Here is an interesting read. It's an interview with the NoScript developer. From August. He was porting the extension months ago, and even then estimated that the release of 57 was the earliest he'd be done (note: he's not done yet, it isn't released as of now when I just checked both the addons "portal" and noscript.net).

In the comments people point out that apparently this guy develops NoScript 24/7, and as far as extension developers go he is the best case scenario. I don't know if it's true that he develops the extension 24/7 or not, but nevertheless, it's clear that Mozilla put a huge burden on the extension developers without giving them a more realistic easing-in period. So you can't blame extension developers that weren't ready for this. It's entirely on Mozilla's shoulders.

On a side note, I'm used to some things being broken in Firefox because of my security addons. NoScript blocking JavaScript, XSS, etc., and Cookie Monster blocking cookies, Ghostery blocking trackers, and AdBlock Plus blocking ads. However, NoScript and Cookie Monster are no longer installed since they are not currently compatible. Usually blocking trackers only break that specific functionality, not the whole site. Similarly, usually blocking ads only prevents the ads from loading, not the page. However, I've noticed that Firefox 57 fails to load various pages even in this state.. Kind of blows my mind. It's probably still addons to blame, but I digress. I seem to have less control over it now. Pretty much I have to just switch to Chrome...

raynebc

As of right now, my Firefox Quantum installation has NoScript working. I didn't even restart my browser, it must have installed the newly-compatible version automatically because it was in my list of obsolete plugins. The UI in it is new, but it looks like it will be easy enough to adapt to. The performance seems fine to me so far, I guess I don't have any more complaints about Fx 57.

Polybios

Well, Noscript's UI could be improved, really has a lot of glitches.

MiquelFire

When I went to Google News this morning, I saw a title (didn't read it) about someone leaving Chrome for Firefox. I wonder if Firefox 57 is actually an improvement for those who were using something else? We just don't notice because we been using Firefox, and the changes break most things we're used to having.

And an add-on somehow got uninstalled by itself just now...

bamccaig

There went my list of opened tabs... I closed Firefox to save some memory while I played CSGO, and when I fired it back up my 50+ opened tabs were lost. Session Manager is what I used to use to manage that, but surprise Firefox 57 doesn't support APIs to reimplement it so now I just don't have that feature. Fuck. Mozilla.

torhu

Options -> General -> When Firefox starts -> Show your windows and tabs from last time

bamccaig

That was already enabled. It appears Firefox lost that setting. Probably from crashing.

raynebc

Before I got a replacement tab/session manager, I'd had pretty reliable luck using History>Restore previous session.

Chris Katko

I've had pretty good luck. I go:

Windows -> Start -> Google Chrome -> Control-Shift-T

OICW

Well, happens to me from time to time that the session is somehow broken. I had to navigate to ~/.mozilla/firefox/<your-profile>/sessionstore-backups and moving either recovery or previous one level up and renaming it. However, correct me if I'm wrong, but it occurs to me that FF57 now uses a different mechanism as I can't seem to locate the session file anymore.

Neil Roy

50 tabs?!?!?! What in hell are you doing that you need 50+ tabs opened?! This would appear to me to be your problem.

bamccaig

It's a generational thing. You start reading a document and that links to 3 other documents. You may be interested in them so you open them up in a tab to peek at them. They're interesting, but they aren't important to read now. You leave them open to read later. Now repeat that process over the course of several months. The number of interesting links you encounter exceeds your reading capacity. It's a losing battle, but one you must fight.

Chris Katko

I used to hit at least 180 tabs by the end of a work day. When I solve problems, each "window" is a distinct problem with tabs related to that problem. And when I google search, I immediately "control click" (open new tab) every applicable result on the first page of results. I then quickly scan and compare-and-contrast for the most useful pages.

I've got 32 GB of RAM. (Only cost $100 on sale.) But even with 8 GB-12 GB of RAM I rarely maxed it out. Nowadays, I run a Windows 10 VM for all my work stuff (to keep that MS crap like Outlook, SQL and Visual Studio from slowing down my desktop). It gets 4 cores, and 8 GB of RAM. I can also RDP into it on a separate IP so my wife can use my "normal" machine, while I remote in from whereever I am and access my work stuff.

The only problem? I upgraded to Windows 10 on my main machine. And what's Windows 10 love to do? RESTART YOUR FREAKING COMPUTER EVERY GODDAMN NIGHT. And what does that do? Terminate my work VM without asking, AND, shuts down Outlook on reboot. What's that mean? It means I DON'T GET MY FUCKING WORK E-MAIL NOTIFICATION SOUNDS until I manually restart my VM and Outlook.

And that's another thing. Outlook is supposed to be the workhorse of the business world. Why in the FUCK does Outlook not have a button to "start with Windows"? I kept looking and kept googling thinking "surely it's here and I missed it." No, all you have to do is learn how to use Windows Scheduled Tasks (another full API/tool full of complexity you don't need!) to schedule Outlook to start at user login. But make sure you have it fire on the RIGHT TRIGGER because many "sound" like the right trigger but apparently "on user login != on machine load" (obvious in retrospect) so Outlook will try to load but can't because your user "logged in" (half your shit is loaded) but not "fully logged in" so Outlook will fail. Oh, and it won't give you an error message either.

Scheduled Tasks is not hard for someone like us but HELLO their entire userbase is people who know nothing about computers. You think any of them are gonna be able to figure out Scheduled Tasks when all they need is a !@$!@$ DAMN "start with windows" button?

I mean damn it! Every. Other. Windows program will start WITHOUT EVEN ASKING YOU and take 90% of our CPU and disk. Windows Defender will literally restart itself after a few hours of being "turned off" without even telling you so much as an event notification. But the one product people would actually benefit from doesn't have that feature? Outlook 2016? More like Outlook 1988.

And I haven't even gotten onto the subject of Windows UNINSTALLING YOUR PROGRAMS without asking you (and resetting all your settings like Chrome as default browser), every time a "major update" comes (every 6 months). Windows uninstalled CoreTemp (temperature monitor + has windows gadget) and 8GadgetTool (adds windows gadgets back to Windows 8 and 10) an hour after I installed them because they "might" be incompatible with Windows 10. (They weren't.)

And I'm testing Windows 10 Enterprise. You know, the version all the fanboys claim you should use if you actually want "control" over your operating system. It's so damn offensive how they treat power users.

You make me thankful I never installed Windows 10. I blocked it from being able to be installed. Still happy with Windows 7. It's MY computer and I will not tolerate any operating system treating it as anything else. Do shit without my permission and you will go bye bye!

As for pages, I just created a folder called "CURRENTLY READING" and I store shortcuts to pages I want to get back to in it.

As for Outlook... haven't used it for well over a decade now. Been using Thunderbird for a long time. But then, I only check my email about once a month.

pkrcel

Windows historically gets a lot of unwarranted hatred (at least as much as the WARRANRTED one )...but Win10 it's M$ best OS by far

I've used several different machines and going back to 7 feels awful (while even 7 didn't shake completely the "good'ol XP days" reminiscence)....and I LOVED Win7.

Also: - doesn't restart my PC(s) every night....didn't almost EVER restart the machines without interaction...those times I woke up in the morning with a warning.."hey I needed to restart due to MAJOR REASONS"...almost like my iPhone(s)

- hasn't uninstalled any of the programs I installed on purpose

- didn't reactivate defender EVER, no to mention windows firewall

- Whenever Win10 Pro has domain policies, it's quite manageable (word of many IT managers I heard, I am so lucky I don't have an IT manager).

I'm feeling Chris just got hit by bad luck with his VM...I ran a couple Win10 VMs on Linux testbeds (old Zotac mini-PCs scavenged from some digital signage totems) and they allowed me a couple months of operation with no major problems...

GRANTED, I'm this close to definitely switch to Ubuntu Mate or Zorin 12 on my work laptop...both on the same Hardware just leave Win10 ages behind in performance...but saying Win10 is that bad feels plain wrong to me.

Chris, what feels 1988 to me is that you rely on desktop notification for emails...wouldn't it be for the keyboard, professionally speaking email is basically 99% mobile....I'm that kind of weird guy that gets warned of incoming mail by his phone, but uses mostly the PC to reply to incoming mail

Chris Katko

I have three windows 10 machines now. The desktop, the VM, and my work laptop. All of are affected in the ways I'm talking about.

bamccaig

I get like 50 emails a day from mailing lists and things of that nature. There's no way I'd want to be notified unless I filtered them first.

I get like 50 emails a day from mailing lists and things of that nature. There's no way I'd want to be notified unless I filtered them first.

worded like that...sounds like a whatsapp problem.

Chris Katko

I'm not saying that it happens to everyone. But it absolutely happens to me and I support Windows installations for clients for a living. I'm no idiot when it comes to diagnosing resource bottlenecks.

Like how Windows telemetry, compatibility, and defender, and search indexer take 100% of my laptop's 5800 RPM hard drive so it literally takes ~5 minutes to boot to desktop. On a "10 windows ready" work laptop.

Or how Windows Photo takes way longer to load photos than their old photo viewer program. (It's still on your computer, go ahead and test.)

Or how their DPI scaling support is still atrocious even for many Microsoft programs. Fonts corrupt. Dialogs shrink vital areas and don't let you resize them. I dare you to try setting DPI to 150% (which was default on my install for some insane reason) and load up various dialogs. Last time I checked even SQL Manager 2014/2016 became completely unusable. And that's a Microsoft product.

I'm actually building a list of positives and negatives. I'm no windows basher. I'll use whatever is great. But Linux is waaay greater in my experience. My tiny (chromebook) netbook with 2 GB of RAM and a Celeron processor is super snappy running the supposedly "bloated" Ubuntu Unity and actually loads the search bar with apps list faster than my 8 core AMD FX-8370. There's even verified tests where a Chrome developer is tracking down why his 24-core Windows machine freezes the mouse with 90% idle CPU usage (spoiler: Tons of single-threaded mutex locks in the Windows API) when he compiles Chrome.

The biggest negative of all is simply that it treats you like an idiot and won't even trust you to override it. Shut of Windows Defender (if you have no other anti-virus) and it WILL turn itself back on within hours.

As for POSITIVES? - Switching between duplicate and extend/one-screen mode using Win+P is WAY WAY FASTER. Explorer in win7 would be frozen for almost a minute while it recached or did whatever it needed to, to "Adapt", and the actual physical screen change is much faster.

- Drag windows to the CORNER of the screen to snap to a QUARTER of your screen. I've long had to use

- Windows 8/10 supports DirectX12 and supports a much faster full-screen capture so if you use OBS/whatever it's much more efficient when doing full-display capture. However, this feature actually WORKS in Windows 7 and someone hacked it in to prove it, but Microsoft simply wants Windows 7 users to leave so they intentionally disabled it and called it an upgrade feature.

- Windows Task Manager FINALLY adds nice GPU monitoring in the fall update so you don't have to use a third-party app for that.

I'm sure I'll notice more positives eventually. But why the HELL do they rename "my computer" -> "computer" -> "this PC" EVERY DAMN VERSION. How is that helping anything? Did some middle-manager get a bonus by suggesting "omg, we gotta rename it. It'll be improved because of synergy."

I'm still pissed they removed Windows Gadgets in Windows 8/10. I love those things. Android has Widgets. Why would they REMOVE a FEATURE like that? So I install 8gadgettool (or whatever) to bring them back. Except, like I mentioned, every Spring/Fall/whatever Creators Update actually UNINSTALLS MY SOFTWARE.

I personally love feeling like a guest on my own computer. I better not bother the real owner of the house, lest I get kicked out.

I get like 50 emails a day from mailing lists and things of that nature. There's no way I'd want to be notified unless I filtered them first.

I'm specifically talking about work e-mails (not general e-mails to my personal accounts) and those come in from my boss, notifying me of new work to do. Sometimes time critical work like a server or product went down and needs fixed ASAP. Due to health problems, I can much more easily "Wake up" if I know there's something critical going on when those e-mails start piling in.

raynebc

To me, Windows 10 is much worse than 7. At work we've deployed some and they have some severe problems with Group Policy that 7 never had. Some of the built-in bloat can't even be controlled with Group Policy unless you have an Enterprise license. The GUI, especially the whole settings subsystem, is slower and clumsier than Windows 7.

pkrcel

The setting subsystem is just an extra layer added for who-da-f*ck-knows why, it's awful!

Start tiled menu on the contrary is quite likeable (finally?) and I'm using it a LOT.

Several of my customers did a short trial migration to Win10 but each of them deployed almost immediately after exactly cause they can manage new deployments with a good proven set of ".reg" strings they "ported" from Win7 (I actually think that they've been porting those since Win 0 but I digress ).

I'm no windows basher nor fanboy, I also think that nowadays Linux is way snappier....but all in all Win10 is a good product and is spot-on for Microsoft.

Edgar Reynaldo

No, sorry, Microsoft is still daft. Windows 10 restarts my laptop without much warning. If I leave it alone more than a day it will restart if it has updates. And then I lose all my open work. Not that I don't save everything but. Also, Windows 10 is still too dumb to use a persistent file for your desktop icon configuration until it actually shuts down, so if you system shuts down unexpectedly, the only way Windoze knows how to recover is to rearrange all your icons into a nice mashup in alphabetical order on the left of your screen, instead of where you left them like it should.

Polybios

Not to mention the ridiculous number of ways Win 10 sends data home to MS?

Neil Roy

I could have gotten Windows 10 for free but... I am so glad I did not. After reading their licence etc... they want too much control over MY COMPUTER. If I ever to "upgrade", unless they come up with something better, I will most likely switch to Linux, Kubuntu or Xubuntu seem nice.

I can always have a Windows install for specific games etc... that need it, and use Linux as my main OS. I refuse to install an OS that treats me like a guest on my own system.

pkrcel

Doesn't Goggle/apple/amazon do the same with their products? Just wondering.

I may hate it as much as the guy next door, but all in all most of these inconsistencies are quite light and do not bother 99,99% of the users...Chris said that MS treats its power users awfully....that's a given, the HATE power users and windows is no power-user OS, I think we have unix-like variants for that...we all know that.

And...it's true that Win10 restarted my PC if it has updates (windows had always to do that since ...well A LONG TIME...and I also hate it), but not that abruptly as all your comments lead me to think...this seriously bugs me, is my system updated?

Windows gotta be windows, and Win10 is a good windows...I didn't expect it to be close to that when I had the unlucky chance to stumble upon win8..brrr...

raynebc

And on the Windows 10 computers I manage at work, getting them to install updates on demand is really unreliable. Much of the time it's wait for a couple hours and see if it did anything after you tell it to check for updates. Or wait a couple hours while it displays a "Getting Windows Ready - Don't turn off your computer" message with absolutely no progress updates. What garbage.

MiquelFire

On a podcast network I listen to, it seems that Windows 10 updated and rebooted during the hours you can configure it to NOT auto reboot. If that was a bug, it may have been fixed already. Oh, and CPU-Z was a program they uninstalled from people machines.

On the mobile front (no clue about Macs), it seems they only really remove programs if they found it doing bad things. Most likely, when they remove a program from the phone/tablet remotely, chances are, the version you were using may have been in fact malware in disguise that passed the checks they do somehow.

Chris Katko

That's another good point. Why is a progress bar or a "expected time to update" so hard to add on an OS that is constantly updating itself. So you have to sit there like an idiot and play the "well, it hasn't taken 30 seconds. Maybe 5 minutes. Nope, still going. Maybe 30 minutes? Nope. 18 hours later, omfg it probably crashed." game.

bamccaig

Windows 8.2ahem 10 is pretty bad with updates. Usually what it does is it will prompt the user that it plans to install updates during off hours (implicitly) and if you want you can choose instead to update now or schedule a different time. In other words, if you aren't there to stop it, it'll update and reboot on its own...

That's not the worst of it. Apparently a major update going around in October actually bricked several machines. I didn't know about this until my finacee's laptop stopped booting. It's often hibernating since she doesn't really use it unless she needs new music or needs to print something out.. Finally she turned it back on and was horrified to discover that it didn't start back up. She asked me to look at it, and I figured it was something innocent, until I realized that it wasn't so simple.

Of course, we don't have proper installation media for the machine because it's an OEM Windows 8 license that we upgraded to 10 online. The error message read "inaccessible boot device" so I assumed a disk cable had come undone or something. And I'm not comfortable enough with computer hardware to attempt to disassemble a laptop on my own. I was prepared to send it to a repair shop, but fortunately I work with a guy that was willing to look at it for me. He's the one that traced it back to Windows update. Apparently Microsoft fixed the update shortly after it rolled out and bricked several machines, but by then the damage was already done. My guy tried to repair the machine, but I think that failed. I didn't fire it up to look, but it sounded like he had to reinstall the system from a downloaded installation media. "Fortunately", because the hardware hadn't changed, Microsoft allowed it to be upgraded to Windows 10 again (Windows 10 is far from perfect, but it's still a lot better than Windows 8).

Worst comes to worst I do have a Windows 7 license sitting on a shelf that I could have used, but I bet my finacee would have been annoyed about "downgrading". She was open to me installing Linux for her instead, except that she needs Windows to access her iPhone.. I was this close.

Neil Roy

I would have installed Windows 7 for her to save her future headaches, especially if she doesn't use it much.

I managed to buy Windows 7 professional for my Wife on Amazon, I was supposed to get the DVD. They let me download it and install it while I waited. After I didn't get it for a long time, I contacted them again and they stated it was download only, no physical disk, which was bull. I contacted Amazon, had my payment cancelled and expected the key to be no good, but to my surprise, it was still working. So... free Windows 7 pro = happy. Got Win7 on both systems now, workin' like a charm. I won't upgrade if I can avoid it unless there is something better. If they try and control MY MACHINE in the future, I will be on Linux.

I had Kubuntu on my wife's computer for a long time, she is computer illiterate and never used Linux especially, but had no problem with it, which to me says a lot about an OS.

pkrcel

For any matter, if you should choose an immediate OS for a Computer average user and don't want to spend a buck, use any flavor of Ubuntu.